The Victorian Religious Tract

Measuring by what has survived, we call the nineteenth century the age of the novel; but if we counted instad what was produced, the Victorians might look more like the people of the tract. One historian calculates that in the first seven years of its existence the Religious Tract Society (foundedby an interdenominational group of Evangelicals in 1799) had distributed two million titles; between 1840 and 1849 that number went up to twenty-three million. — Leah Price, How to do things with books in Victorian Britain

The History of Protestant Religious Tracts and Societies for their Dissemination